Boosting Patient Experience Scores with CipherRounds

Background

Prisma Health Greenville Memorial Hospital, part of South Carolina’s largest private, non-profit healthcare system, is the premier referral center for Upstate South Carolina. Located in Greenville, it houses a 24-hour Level I Trauma Center, the region’s only pediatric trauma center, and the sole solid organ transplant center.
In the 2023 fiscal year, the hospital handled over 108,000 Emergency Department visits, driven by its Level I trauma status and higher-than-Average Daily Census (ADC).

The Challenge of improving the Patient Experience

Prisma Health Greenville Memorial Hospital faced a significant challenge: improving patient experience outcomes in their Emergency Department (ED). Their facility, with its multi-pod layout, lacked a systematic approach, leading to poor patient workflow and making it difficult to provide exceptional care in a bustling ED. Enhancing the “Likelihood to Recommend” (LTR) metric on the HCAHPS survey became a top priority.

Next Steps

Prisma Health Greenville Memorial Hospital’s proactive executive team set clear goals to enhance ED patient experience metrics, targeting a 3-5% increase in key drivers like “Good Communication between Staff” and “Trust Provider with Care”, which are part of their patient surveys.

Recognizing the need for innovative and effective technology, to achieve these goals, they introduced CipherRounds to the ED. As the Executive Director of Patient Experience at Prisma Health, Tina Hunter, MBA, BSN, RN, explained, “Our top priority was implementing a solution that helped our nursing and care teams work more efficiently, giving them more time for meaningful patient interactions while also tracking and identifying trends from patient feedback. We recognized the importance of quickly addressing patient issues, making an automatic alerting system crucial. That’s why we turned to CipherHealth.”

eBook

Rounding Toolkit

CipherRounds: Solution Implementation and Results

Prisma Health Greenville Memorial Hospital implemented CipherRounds to streamline operations, engage more effectively with ED patients, and promptly address and track patients’ feedback, needs, and concerns. By creating customized scripts with tailored questions, they identified opportunities for improvement and escalated issues as needed. Continuous tracking and trending of feedback allowed for the measurement of success and informed quality improvement projects.

Since launching CipherRounds, Greenville Memorial has seen significant improvements in patient satisfaction, with their Likelihood to Recommend scores rising from the 6th percentile to the 51st percentile. Between October 2022 and July 2023, the use of CipherRounds led to notable improvements in patient experience metrics:

Additionally, Prisma Health Greenville Memorial Hospital launched several improvement projects based on data gathered during their Pulse Learning Collaboratives, a key element of Prisma’s Pulse program, a system-wide initiative aimed at building a highly visible and dynamic safety, quality and experience management program. This included initiatives to improve cleanliness through their Environmental Services (EVS) partnership project and improving bedside shift report (BSSR).